Knowing the velocity of a mobile radio communication device such as a cellular telephone is very useful in numerous areas of mobile communications. For example, knowing the velocity a mobile radio is useful when performing call hand-offs, as well as when performing power control because velocity and magnitude of fade are related. In U.S. patent application publication No. US2002/0172307 A1, the Doppler spread proportional to the mobile velocity is computed using an autocorrelation function of a complex channel estimate and a detection of the zero-crossing of the complex autocorrelation based on a direct Bessel function is performed in order to estimate the mobile's velocity. This technique requires the computation of several autocorrelations with several lags until the first zero crossing and produces a computationally cumbersome algorithm. Other prior art velocity estimation techniques also require a lot of computations in order to estimate a mobile radio's velocity. Given this, a need exists in the art for a method and apparatus for mobile radio velocity estimation that can minimize some of the problems in the prior art.